Quick question. How do you write "delicious" in Japanese?
If you said おいしい, you are right. If you said 美味しい, you are also right, and you are also the person at the party saying "perambulate".
Three changes went out this week, and two of them come from the same annoyance.
Some words wear their kanji on days off
Here is something nobody tells you early enough: plenty of Japanese words have perfectly good kanji that almost nobody uses.
りんご has kanji. It is 林檎. You will not find it at a grocery store. きれい is 綺麗, ありがとう is 有難う, だめ is 駄目. All real, all technically correct, all quietly ignored in favour of kana.
Why this bugged us. You have limited brain space and Japanese is enormous. An hour spent drilling 林檎 is an hour not spent on a kanji you will actually meet. Worse, seeing an unfamiliar kanji spelling of a word you already know makes you feel behind when you are not.
What changed. Words that usually live in kana now carry a small Usually kana tag, and we always show the reading above them. So 綺麗 turns up with きれい sitting on top of it and you get to say "oh, that one, I know that one".
A little more context, right where you need it
The gap. Kumi knew a lot about each word and showed you almost none of it. You got the word and the meaning, and everything else you had to infer.
What we added. Trait chips on lesson and review cards. Little labels under the word for things like Usually kana and Sound word, plus the domain the word sits in.
We also swapped the explanations from browser tooltips to proper in-app ones, so they actually look like part of Kumi and show up reliably on the devices where the old ones did not.
The row hides itself entirely when a word has nothing interesting to declare. No empty furniture.
Because you were never going to do 200 cards
Nobody opens a 200 word list and thinks "great, all of it".
But that is what list review used to give you, whether nine cards were due or all of them. Predictably, people stopped touching it.
You can now flip it to due-only and get exactly the cards that are ready. The counts shown up front are accurate too, so you know what you are agreeing to before you start.
Where the good ideas come from
We read everything in Discord and a surprising amount of it turns into actual features. All three of this week's changes started there.
Come tell us what is annoying you: discord.gg/learnkumi
That’s it for this week.
Is there a kanji you learned, felt proud of, and then never saw again?
— The Kumi Team